HP aggressively went after IBM's x86 customers ahead of the Lenovo acquisition and had some success. Lenovo execs say it's now time to fight back and become the No. 1 server vendor. On Oct. 1, Lenovo will be No. 3.

In the red hot cloud computing market, major players such as Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and VMware now offer their own distribution of OpenStack. Meanwhile, Piston Cloud is playing its security, management and installation as differentiators. Will it work?

The industry group representing Apple, Microsoft, HP and IBM has argued that if Australian competition law is changed to ban the so-called Australia tax on technology, it might drive companies out of the country.

Cloud computing is rearranging the datacentre infrastructure market: large server makers are seeing their dominance wane as competition grows from low-cost Asian manufacturers that sell directly to the clouds of Google, Amazon and others.

Alcatel-Lucent poses that carriers have special needs for their cloud implementations that requirements for reliability, availability, security and control that go beyond those of a typical organization. The company believes that it is uniquely qualified to address those needs. Unfortunately for them, so does Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and just about everyone else.

Dell had its highest revenue market share ever in the second quarter. Oracle's server sales were thumped. IBM saw soft demand for System x, Power Systems and System z as all three were on tap to be refreshed. HP saw flat x86 ProLiant sales, but Integrity demand fell.

Stratus Technologies just launched a new version of its Avance high availability platform that supports Intel Xeon E5 “Sandy Bridge” processor-powered servers, such as those offered by HP, IBM, Dell and Intel. This technology is designed to make it possible for customers to know that their applications will operate without interruption. The problem? Stratus is known and loved by only a small circle of friends.

As HP, IBM, Dell, and Cisco battle each other to develop workload-centric infrastructures that tie hardware and software together, VMware continues to blaze the software-only path. Forrester's Dave Bartoletti shares how the latest acquisitions signal an important strategy shift for VMware.